Comments On McVeigh (1996)

’Commodifying Affection, Authority and Gender in the Everyday Objects of Japan’, published in 3(1), November 1996, of the Journal of Material Culture, aimed to describe how cute objects that are popular in Japan communicate messages about being the ’ideal’ woman. McVeigh’s analysis of Japanese cute is problematic on more than one account. The first problem is that the article is based on personal anecdotal evidence. It contains no indications of any substantial literary or ethnographic research into the subject matter. This leads naturally to two major theoretical problems: the article is both entirely ahistorical, and substantially based on the uncritical application of out-of-date Orientalist theories of Japanese society. We are left to ponder for ourselves what century and what decade McVeigh is decoding. The Japanese cuteness phenomenon, meanwhile, is entirely historical. Cute began to get popular in the latter half of the 1970s, when the first childish pop idols emerged and teenage girls started inventing infantile slang words and writing styles. In the first half of the